As a sociologist, I’m not interested in adjudicating this case according to an official legal definition of genocide. Rigid legal concepts can interfere with understanding the social nature of group destruction. It can flatten the analysis of group relations. It can serve as a hammer to pound a complicated history into a singular event.

One genocide is never the same as another, and therefore a static law or a fixed concept of genocide is of little use to protect us from its horrors. Understanding genocide as a process can help Canadians grapple with the ongoing threat faced by Indigenous peoples in Canada and Indigenous women and girls as outlined in the final MMIWG report.

Legal professionals over time have had to adjust their reading of genocide law. Since the Second World War, contesting ideas and debate have brought about changes to how legal scholars and courts interpret genocide. The authors of the genocide supplement for the MMIWG report draw upon these interpretations but also pose new challenges to the laws of genocide.

These questions are necessary because the history of settler colonialism in Canada includes a variety of efforts to remove, assimilate, starve and erase Indigenous nations. When one approach failed, the settler colonial mesh recalibrated.

For example, residential schools mutated into child removals and mass incarceration. Moreover, the strands of the mesh continue to entrap and strangle communities long after the supposed end of any one manifestation of group destruction.

Colonial and masculine assumptions are evident in genocide law, as is the political will of the drafting parties to protect their own nations from accusations of genocide, hence the withdrawal of Article III from the final document.

Despite these beginnings, the law develops as people engage with it, and genocide case law has gradually addressed some of the limitations of the UNGC.

For example, through decisions from bodies such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the groups protected from genocide have been expanded beyond narrow understandings of ethnicity, nationhood, religion and race.

The MMIWG final report seeks to bring a grassroots, gendered and Indigenous reading of these laws to the discussion of MMIWG and how Canada’s actions and omissions contributed to their deaths.

This is a valuable contribution and pushes the boundaries of the definition of genocide. Thinking on this topic always needs to be pushed.

Genocide is a transgressive act. It overturns all expectations, violates social norms and continuously mutates to take on new and surprising forms. Different readings and interpretations of genocide are needed to truly confront the many evolving methods of group destruction.

Residential schools can be seen as situated within a series of nets that operated on all levels in society, including at the upper echelons of society among elite social influencers, and also through government and missionary institutions as well as individual teachers, principals and communities. There was a complex coordination of activities, habits, ideologies, motives and intents that were generally directed toward eliminating Indigenous peoples as distinct peoples.

These layers of destructive action can be likened to a settler colonial mesh constructed to entrap Indigenous peoples within an assimilative project. But the mesh is prone to snags and tears allowing for the emergence of resistance and subversion. Indigenous people were not passive; parents refused to send their children, children ran away and communities sometimes preserved their cultures when conditions allowed.

Impact on group destruction

The MMIWG report is about the results of such processes and their effects on community and family relationships: harmful relations established through settler colonialism, their impact on intimate and everyday group relations and the possibility of better relations in the future.

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